Studia Litteraria

Universitatis Iagellonicae Cracoviensis 6 (2011)

DOI: 10.4467/20843933ST.11.005.0303

BOŻENA KUCAŁA
Instytut Filologii Angielskiej
Uniwersytet Jagielloński

The Natural and the Supernatural in Muriel Spark’s Fiction

Abstract

A striking feature of Muriel Spark’s fiction is its insistence on the reality of the supernatural,
which occasionally breaks into the naturalistic level, defying and challenging habitual modes
of perception. The fact of Spark being a religious convert is well known, but her faith is mani-
fested in ways different from what is normally assumed to be religious writing. Spark’s novels
are never overtly didactic or moralistic; the impact of her faith is manifest in the notion of
reality as conveyed by her fiction. Spark’s vision of reality, underlain by her Catholicism, is
based on her conviction that empirical reality coexists with the supernatural world; therefore,
interactions with the supernatural, however strange they may seem, are presented in her fiction
as compellingly plausible. It is argued in the article that Spark’s ontology of fiction is rooted in
a tradition going back to Chesterton, who insisted on the paradoxical conjunction of nonsense
and faith, both capable of invoking a sense of spiritual wonder at the world we normally take
for granted. Memento Mori, Reality and Dreams as well as selected short stories are referenced
to illustrate the peculiar combination of the empirical and the supernatural in Spark’s fiction.
The article asserts the paradox, central to Spark’s vision of reality, that the supernatural should
be accepted as a natural part of profane experience.

Keywords: Catholic novel, English short stories, Muriel Spark, natural and supernatural in
literature, religion in literature

Although only a minority of Muriel Spark’s novels overtly engage with Catholi-
cism or faith in general, an “explicit or implicit expression of faith in a divine or-
der” remains one of “the consistent factors” of her fiction (Whittaker 12). Spark’s
conversion, which by her own admission triggered her creativity by providing her
with a comprehensive framework of beliefs, also determined her notion of reality.
The protagonist of her first novel The Comforters, much like Spark at that stage
of her life, is having a breakdown related to her conversion. During this time of
turmoil in her personal life, Caroline is writing a book on the contemporary novel
and experiences problems with the chapter on realism. Despite the fact that the
protagonist keeps hearing a mysterious typewriter recording the story she herself
is in, the setting and characterisation are too realistic for the novel to be relegated
66 BOŻENA KUCAŁA

to the sphere of fantasy. This peculiar interpenetration of the natural on the one
hand and, on the other hand, the supernatural, the bizarre and the extraordinary
was to be a hallmark of Spark’s many subsequent novels and short stories. In the
words of Norman Page, “Muriel Spark is less interested in ‘pure’ realism or ‘pure’
fantasy [...] than in the intersection of or blending of the two” (Page 31). Spark’s
implicit insistence in her fiction that however strange and incomprehensible cer-
tain occurrences may appear, they must be accepted as part of the phenomenal
world stems from her conviction regarding the existence of a higher, divine order
which occasionally makes itself felt by thwarting the plans and scenarios that hu-
man beings produce, and by challenging their limited perspectives.
In her book The Faith and Fiction of Muriel Spark Ruth Whittaker contrasts
Spark’s reservations about mimesis with the English realist tradition, epitomised
by writers such as George Eliot or Mrs Gaskell, both committed to a faithful rep-
resentation of the apprehensible world (Whittaker 4). George Eliot’s type of real-
ism stems from her deep-rooted confidence in the world’s essential accessibility to
knowledge and human understanding. Her novels, as T.R. Wright put it, “present
Christianity through the reductive lenses of Strauss and Feuerbach,” which entails
“explain[ing] supernatural belief in purely human terms,” while “the only myster-
ies allowed by the narrator are those of the human heart” (Wright 115–116).
George Eliot has been categorised as one of the touchstones of the greatness
of the English novel, which is eulogised by Q.D. Leavis in “The Englishness of
the English Novel.” The critic underlines “truth to life and its scope” (Leavis 135)
as the backbone of the English novel, while arguing that “it has traditionally been
the product of an essentially Protestant culture” (Leavis 139). Leavis’s emphasis
on the moral responsibility of fiction does not prevent her from denigrating the
two well-known English Catholic writers, Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh, for
their “spiritual pedantry” (Leavis 140). Although written in 1980, Leavis’s essay
does not address Muriel Spark. But if it did, Spark would certainly be condemned
for her failure to comply with Leavis’s notion of realism, understood as a repre-
sentation of the empirically knowable individual and social life.
C.S. Lewis once noted that the category of “truth to life,” commonly used
as a measure of realism in fiction, may be broken down into two types, each
designating a different kind of realism. Middlemarch exemplifies novels which
present what is typical and usual in human affairs. The other realism distinguished
by Lewis denotes things which, despite being possible and conceivable, are ex-
ceptional and happen rarely, or perhaps could happen only once. Great Expecta-
tions, which, notwithstanding its realism of representation, tells a very unusual
and almost improbable story, may serve as an example of the other type of real-
ism (Lewis 60–65). Lewis comments on fiction of the latter type in the following
words:
The strange events are not clothed with hypothetical probability in order to increase our
knowledge of real life by showing how it would react to this improbable test. It is the other
way round. The hypothetical probability is brought in to make the strange events more fully
imaginable. Hamlet is not faced with a ghost in order that his reactions may tell us more
about his nature and therefore about human nature in general; he is shown reacting naturally
in order that we may accept the ghost. (Lewis 66)
The Natural and the Supernatural in Muriel Spark’s Fiction 67

The disturbing nature of Spark’s fiction arises out of the contrast between its
factual narrative mode and its bewildering content. Sudden deaths, the characters’
erratic behaviour, twists in the stories are proffered without narratorial clarifica-
tion. Such “interruptions,” as Penelope Fitzgerald has called them, are “a remind-
er of the vast unseen presences on which our lives are dependent or contingent”
(Fitzgerald 7). Yet even on occasions when happenings defy rationality, there is
some room left for a highly unlikely and yet possible empirical explanation. Nov-
els such as Memento Mori or The Driver’s Seat play with the conventions of
detective fiction – a genre in which the plot is propelled by a quest for truth. The
truth that emerges from Spark’s novels is stranger than fiction: the protagonist
of The Driver’s Seat is finally murdered, which appears to have been her goal
throughout the story. It is she who pursues her future murderer, while the unwill-
ing criminal is on the run from his potential victim. Page suggests that the aim of
Spark’s parodic engagement with the mimetic tradition is to expose “the falsity
of fictions that make untenable claims to represent reality” (Page 26–27). In her
essay “Catholicism, Character, and the Invention of the Liberal Novel Tradition”
Marina MacKay uses the example of The Driver’s Seat to argue that
At the end of the twentieth century, we see a coincidence of the metafictional and the meta-
physical: the strategies of the “Catholic” novel, with its rejection of liberal, realist ortho-
doxies, become postmodern truisms. And, in a final irony, Catholicism’s uncompromising
belief in realities beyond the reach of human reason becomes indistinguishable from the
radical skepticism of the postmodern. (MacKay 236)

The action in Memento Mori revolves around a series of telephone calls made
to several elderly people. A voice invariably conveys the message “Remember
that you must die.” Speculations about the identity of the caller proliferate and
complaints are made to the police. However, the culprit cannot be found, although
the episodes when certain people receive the message are confirmed by witnesses,
and presented by the omniscient narrator in a factual manner. An experienced po-
liceman, when asked for help, immediately realises that this is one of those cases
when the human ability to understand and explain reaches its limit: “[these peo-
ple] think that the C.I.D. are God, understanding all mysteries and all knowledge.
Whereas we are only policemen” (MM 153). Mortimer calmly announces that
“considering the evidence [...] the offender is Death himself” (MM 142). In his
eyes, the natural, if examined without the prejudice of narrow rationality, contains
manifestations of the supernatural. The paradox is that “it is precisely the absence
of a trace that leads Mortimer to this conclusion” (Pero 563). However, by refus-
ing to give a full account of the explanation Mortimer radically challenges the role
traditionally played by the detective in crime fiction (Pero 563). Another paradox
in the novel is that the empirically-minded characters who completely deny the
possibility that the caller is Death himself appear to be blinkered and unreason-
able. Their dismissal of the most obvious solution to the mystery corresponds
to their refusal to accept the prospect of death, although their mental and bodily
decrepitude makes mortality arrantly imminent.
Characteristically, the Sparkian narrator refuses to analyse and explain; in-
stead she confronts her characters (as Spark confronts her readers) with baffling
68 BOŻENA KUCAŁA

developments while implying that the events may constitute a part of some ob-
scure, non-human pattern. As Whittaker notes, the purpose of the trivial and the
commonplace in Spark’s fiction is not only to set up a familiar world but also to
establish a context for the revelation of the unfamiliar (Whittaker 5). One of the
characters in Memento Mori, convinced that there is a criminal gang behind the
pestering phone-calls, is indeed murdered. The crime seems to validate the natu-
ralistic explanation of the calls, but only in the eyes of those characters who, not
knowing all the facts, apply their mental clichés to the situation. But the narrative
shows the surprising fact that the criminals had singled out Dame Lettie only after
hearing the news about the mysterious caller and the old lady’s self-imposed iso-
lation, which obviously facilitated the crime. Without clarifying the identity of the
caller, the narrator nevertheless confronts us with the stark fact that the reminder
of death does come true after all. In the words of Allan Pero, “That the impossible
has happened (Death on the phone for you, dear) remains just that: an impossible
but necessary truth” (Pero 563).
Apart from the policeman, whose conclusion that Death himself makes the
telephone calls is derived from his humbling experience of the limitations of hu-
man cognition, only two other characters treat the message seriously and, at the
same time, stoically. It is probably no coincidence that these two – Charmian and
Jean Taylor – happen to be Catholics. Yet, ironically, their sensible attitude to the
intimation of mortality is interpreted by others as a symptom of insanity. Alec
Warner, an amateur researcher of senility and arch representative of the empirical
attitude in the novel, admits: “The more religious people are, the more perplex-
ing I find them” (MM 171). But no sooner has Alec expressed satisfaction with
his scientific methods than he finds his flat, together with his meticulous records,
on fire. He receives a painful lesson in the fragility of all things material and the
limits of human enquiry, and suffers a stroke that reduces him to a condition in
which he is capable only of obsessively examining his own mind. As Chesterton
once said, nothing “essentially reasonable has ever arisen out of the pure reason”
(Chesterton 126).
Indeed, Spark’s religiously motivated demand for the reader to accept the sur-
prising nature of the world may be traced back to G.K. Chesterton, a staunch
Catholic and a master of paradox. In his essay “A Defence of Nonsense” Ches-
terton argues that
Religion has for centuries been trying to make men exult in the “wonders” of creation, but it
has forgotten that a thing cannot be completely wonderful as long as it remains sensible. So
long as we regard a tree as an obvious thing, naturally and reasonably created for a giraffe
to eat, we cannot properly wonder at it. It is when we consider it as a prodigious wave of the
living soil sprawling up to the skies for no reason in particular that we take off our hats, to
the astonishment of the park-keeper. Everything has in fact another side to it, like the moon,
the patroness of nonsense. (Chesterton 126–127)

Very much in the Chestertonian fashion, Spark’s fiction ostensibly blurs the
boundary between nonsense and truth, between madness and faith. What appears
absurd may, if viewed from another perspective, be perfectly congruous with the
unpredictable nature of the world; seemingly insane behaviour may in fact be
The Natural and the Supernatural in Muriel Spark’s Fiction 69

based on wisdom and insight. While it could seem mad to believe that Death is
capable of making telephone calls, it is perfectly reasonable to acknowledge that
an aged person should expect to die. Of the “four last things” enumerated in the
Penny Catechism (Death, Judgement, Hell, and Heaven) – quoted as one of the
epigraphs to the novel – the existence of the first is beyond any doubt, quite ir-
respective of one’s attitude to religion.
In Spark’s short story entitled “Come along, Marjorie” the persistent juxtapo-
sition of the sacred and the profane centres on the assessment of Marjorie, the one
character who, according to the narrator, eludes classification. Despite generally
being regarded as insane, she stands out among all the other neurotic patients
since her kind of “mental aberration” (as the narrator puts it) resists categorisa-
tion, just as she herself resists treatment. The protagonist-narrator, also suffering
from a mental breakdown, veers between the options that Marjorie is a clear men-
tal case, or that she is perfectly sane and that she alone understands the purpose
of the place. Marjorie, who reminds Gloria of an abbess, remains a disturbing
presence in the community of Catholic convalescents at an old abbey-cum-mod-
ern health resort. The outline of the history of the place highlights a succession
of pagan and Christian phases. Marjorie’s self-imposed solitude, religiously ob-
served silence and constant prayer, ironically enough, alienate her from the other
Catholics, and, even more ironically, from the resident monks; everyone except
Marjorie follows an essentially secular lifestyle. A typically Sparkian clash be-
tween the natural and the supernatural, or the profane and the sacred, occurs on
the single occasion when Marjorie talks to the narrator, Gloria. Gloria is anxiously
awaiting a telephone call. At the moment when Marjorie approaches her with the
news that she has a message for her, Gloria’s expectations are totally centered on
the desired call.
“Excuse me,” she said, “I have a message for you.” [...]
“What’s the message?”
“The Lord is risen,” she said.
It was not until I had got over my disappointment that I felt the shock of her having spoken,
and recalled an odd focus of her eyes that I had not seen before. “After all,” I thought, “she
has a religious mania [...].”
“Gloria!” – this was the girl from the repository poking her head round the door. She beck-
oned to me... (CSS 311)

Because the narrator is awaiting a completely different, down-to-earth mes-

sage, Marjorie’s announcement “The Lord is risen” disappoints her, although the
secretary’s immediate calling of her first name “Gloria” constitutes a strangely
appropriate response to the good news. Despite Gloria’s Catholicism, the nature
of the message is interpreted by her as proof of Marjorie’s insanity, and, like the
characters in Memento Mori, she does not consider the possibility that the extraor-
dinary message may be true. Gloria’s narration remains characteristically poised
between two perspectives, leaving both her and the other characters wondering
at the strangeness of their otherworldly fellow Catholic. After Marjorie Pettigrew
is forcibly taken away to a mental hospital, the whole community unites in “con-
templating with fear and pity the calling of Miss Pettigrew Marjorie” (CSS 315)
70 BOŻENA KUCAŁA

– an ambiguous conclusion, signifying simultaneously their annoyance at the dis-

respectful treatment of Marjorie by the ambulance men, and their amazement at
Marjorie’s mysterious vocation.
Spark’s early short story, “The Seraph and the Zambezi,” is a paradigmatic
example of both her juxtaposition of natural and supernatural plots and her pe-
culiar intersection of realism and fantasy. The production of a Nativity play is
interrupted by a Seraph who asserts his right to the story against the director of
the play. A hilarious argument follows between the two:
“Once and for all –”
“That’s correct,” said the Seraph.
“– this is my show,” continued Cramer.
“Since when?” the Seraph said.
“Right from the start,” Cramer breathed at him.
“Well, it’s been mine from the Beginning,” said the Seraph, “and the Beginning began
first.” (CSS 100)

Members of the audience attempt to drive the strange creature away with fire,
not knowing that a Seraph is a creature of fire. The fire that breaks out destroys
the entire set of the play, and no one detects any irony in the fact that Cramer is
insured against everything except “acts of God.” However, the circumstances of
the bizarre event preclude categorisation of the story as pure fantasy. The narrator
stresses the unusual heat of December in Africa, where the play is rehearsed for
the sake of the small European community. The heat is so intense that the pro-
tagonist doubts the evidence of her senses: “When an atmosphere maintains an
excessive temperature for a long spell something seems to happen to the natural
noises of life. Sound fails to carry in its usual quantity, but comes as if bound and
gagged” (CSS 95). The protagonist seems to observe the Seraph departing along
the river:
Then I noticed that along the whole mile of the waterfall’s crest the spray was rising higher
than usual. This I took to be steam from the Seraph’s heat. I was right, for presently, by the
mute flashes of summer lightning, we watched him ride the Zambezi away from us, among
the rocks that look like crocodiles and the crocodiles that look like rocks. (CSS 103)

The phantasmagoric atmosphere of the African Christmas Eve invites both

miracles and hallucinations. Spark’s inspiration for this short story was character-
istically twofold: “certainly I believe in angels, and I had been up the Zambesi on
a boat” (qtd. in Whittaker 1).
Another short story, “The Black Madonna,” also involves an event suspended
between a natural and a supernatural mode. If it were the latter, then this would be
another instance of an unexpected and ultimately unwelcome divine intervention.
A childless Catholic couple pray to the miraculous Black Madonna in their parish,
but when their request for a baby is granted, their amazement reveals how weak
is their faith in miracles. Although it stands to reason that a baby given by a black
Madonna might be black, the couple absolutely refuse to accept this explanation.
The wife’s infidelity seems unlikely, given the degree of her racial prejudice, but
the biologically defensible possibility that the genes of her distant black ancestor
have manifested themselves in her baby is also rejected. Although unable to deny
The Natural and the Supernatural in Muriel Spark’s Fiction 71

their paternity of the baby, the couple decide that giving it up for adoption is the
most reasonable solution. Yet the child’s mother admits that what they have done
is right rather than good; “Apparently, there’s a difference” (CSS 437).
Spark’s fiction refuses to offer a naive version of poetic justice, perhaps in rec-
ognition of her conviction that the human sense of justice is hardly ever satisfied
in real life. One of her books, The Only Problem, features a protagonist exploring
The Book of Job with the intention of solving the problem of suffering. Predict-
ably, his pursuit turns out to be futile. G.K. Chesterton once remarked on the
biblical text’s defiance of rational analysis: the God that speaks to Job “insists on
the inexplicableness of everything” and “on the positive and palpable unreason of
things” (qtd. in Christensen 139). Chesterton’s comments correspond to the over-
all inscrutability of the divine order in Spark’s fiction. Suffering and death may
appear quite contingent: in Reality and Dreams Dave the taxi driver, a perfectly
innocent minor character, receives the fatal shot aimed at his client who, despite
his guilt, escapes unscathed. In The Ballad of Peckham Rye the devilish character
Dougal Douglas is never punished for the disruption that he has caused in peo-
ple’s lives. Characters who effectively act as instruments of justice are not always
likeable or morally straight. Marigold, the malicious daughter of the protagonist
in Reality and Dreams, is a distinctly wicked character who nevertheless manages
to undermine her father’s equally wicked, manipulative plans. The wise Catholic
Jean Taylor in Memento Mori brings about a reconciliation between a married
couple by betraying the wife’s secret to the husband. And Sandy in The Prime of
Miss Jean Brodie, prior to becoming a Catholic nun, betrays her teacher in order
to put a stop to her destructive influence on her students.
Whereas the distribution of rewards and punishments may appear arbitrary
in Spark’s novels, there is one sin which is invariably exposed: the sin of pride.
Spark’s fiction features a gallery of plot-makers, characters who usurp power to
construct scenarios for their own and other people’s lives. In this, of course, they
encroach on the domain of the Creator. Sandy’s resistance to Miss Brodie is for-
mulated as: “She thinks she is Providence [...], she thinks she is the God of Calvin,
she sees the beginning and the end” (PMJB 120).
There are numerous professional plotters in Spark’s fiction, such as Tom Ri-
chards, the film director in Reality and Dreams. His arrogance and arbitrariness
in assigning roles in his films reflects his overall arrogance and selfishness in his
relations with others. The novel starts after his fall from a crane, an apt emblem of
his tendency to self-elevation. As his lawyer comments,
There was no need, no need for you to go up that crane. An ordinary dolly is perfectly all
right for directing a motion picture these days. But no, you have to be different, you have
to be right up there beside the photographer, squeezed in, and without a seat-belt. You have
to be God. (RD 13)

On reflection, Tom secretly admits,

Yes, I did feel like God up on that crane. It was wonderful to shout orders through the
amplifier and like God watch the team down there group and re-group as bidden. [...] What
do they think a film set is? A democracy, or something? I simply don’t regret that crane for
a moment. (RD 14)
72 BOŻENA KUCAŁA

The director’s fall from his superior place is followed by a series of frustrating
incidents:
As soon as I hear a bit of news these days [...] someone comes along to contradict it. My
film was cancelled now it’s going ahead. My son-in-law was looking for a job but now he’s
left my daughter and gone for a holiday in India. First I had to go back to hospital and now
I don’t. (RD 31)

Yet Tom refuses to learn his lesson – on recovering, he continues to make

scenarios and finally again attempts to go up the crane. However, he will have to
face the fact that there is another plotter, antagonistic to him – his own daughter
Marigold, whose special, sinister objective is to challenge her father’s arrogance:
“I’d like him to go up in the crane and this time come down with a final thump.
He doesn’t need the crane. These days it’s only a director’s expensive toy. I’d like
to fix it for him, and him with it” (RD 159). Yet what Marigold, the self-appointed
judge, fails to take account of is the fact that above each plotter there may be an-
other, more powerful one. Her plans to deal her father’s pride a fatal blow misfire
because the girl who, at Marigold’s instigation, tampered with the crane has a fatal
accident herself.
In all Spark’s novels, certain characters weave their own plots, which are typi-
cally at some point thwarted by other characters, fate – or perhaps a superhuman
agency. On one level, they are all certainly thwarted by the writer, who will not
leave hubris unpunished. As Brooke Allen observed, “She clearly enjoys the God-
role, sitting up in her particular crane and surveying her creatures with condescen-
sion” (n.p.). Bryce Christensen notes that in Spark’s books “Narratives [...] born
of merely human desires, vanity, or imaginings – threaten to ensnare us in destruc-
tive, if beguiling, falsehoods; such narratives fall beneath rather than transcend
rational understanding” (Christensen 144). In an interview with Frank Kermode,
Spark asserted: “I don’t claim that my novels are truth – I claim that they are fic-
tion, out of which a kind of truth emerges. [...] there is absolute truth, in which
I believe things which are difficult to believe, but believe them because they are
absolute” (Kermode 133).

Abbreviations
CCS – The Complete Short Stories
MM – Memento Mori
PMJB – The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
RD – Reality and Dreams

Bibliography
Primary sources
Spark, M., The Ballad of Peckham Rye, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1977.
–, The Comforters, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1982.
–, The Complete Short Stories of Muriel Spark, London: Penguin Books, 2002.
The Natural and the Supernatural in Muriel Spark’s Fiction 73

–, Memento Mori, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1969.

–, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, London: Penguin Books, 1965.
–, Reality and Dreams, London: Penguin Books, 1997.

Secondary sources
Allen, B., “Enjoying the God-role [review of Reality and Dreams],” New Leader 80:8,
5 May 1997, 16–17. Academic Search Complete Web. 25 March 2011.
Chesterton, G.K., “A Defence of Nonsense,” Stories, Essays, and Poems, London:
J.M. Dent and Sons, 1939.
Christensen, B., “‘The Latter End of Job’: The Gift of Narrative in Muriel Spark’s The
Only Problem and The Comforters,” Renascence 54:2 (2002): 136–147.
Fitzgerald, P., “A Character in One of God’s Dreams [review of Reality and Dreams],”
New York Times Book Review, 11 May 1997: 7.
Kermode, F., “The House of Fiction,” The Novel Today: Contemporary Writers on
Modern Fiction, ed. Malcolm Bradbury, Manchester: Manchester University
Press; Totowa: Rowman and Littlefield by agreement with Fontana Books, 1977:
111–135.
Leavis, Q.D., “The Englishness of the English Novel,” English Studies 62:2 (1981):
128–145.
MacKay, M., “Catholicism, Character, and the Invention of the Liberal Novel Tradi-
tion,” Twentieth-Century Literature, 48:2 (2002): 215–238.
Lewis, C.S., An Experiment in Criticism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1961.
Page, N., Muriel Spark, Houndsmills and London: Macmillan, 1990.
Pero, A., “‘Look for One Thing and You Find Another’: The Voice and Deduction in
Muriel Spark’s Memento Mori,” Modern Fiction Studies, 54:3 (2008): 558–573.
Whittaker, R., The Faith and Fiction of Muriel Spark, London: Macmillan, 1984.
Wright, T.R., Theology and Literature, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988.
 Noty o autorach

Krzysztof Bak is Associate Professor at the Swedish Department, Jagiellonian University, Cra-
cow and at the Department of Literature and History of Ideas, Stockholm University. His latest
book is Den intersubjekitva synden i Birgitta Trotzigs Dykungens (Intersubjective Sin in the
Marsh King’s Daughter by Birgitta Trotzig).
Monika Coghen is Reader in English Literature at the Jagiellonian University in Cracow. She
has worked on British Romanticism and the Gothic, and Anglo-Polish cultural relations in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She has published numerous articles, particularly on the
dramas by Coleridge, Wordsworth and Byron, and the Polish reception of Coleridge and Shel-
ley. Her other areas of interest include the British nineteenth-century novel and Polish Romanti-
cism. She is currently working on the reception of Byron in Poland.
Szymon Kostek is a Ph.D. in Cultural Studies, a historian of theatre and drama at the Uni-
versity of Silesia in Katowice, Poland. His doctoral thesis was titled Interpersonal Rituals in
Włodzimierz Perzyński’s Dramas which was defended and accepted in 2010 (thesis supervi-
sor: Professor Ewa Wąchocka). He is interested in the European dramaturgy of the end of the
nineteenth century (psychological realism, naturalism). His papers are concerned with works
of Per Olov Enquist, Kazimierz Kutz, Aleksei Kazantsev, Paweł Sala. A member of The Polish
Society of Theatre Historians.
Anna Kowalcze-Pawlik is a Ph. D. candidate at the Jagiellonian University, Cracow. Her fields
of research include medievalism, Medieval and Renaissance Studies as well as literary theories.
She is currently working on two Ph. D. projects, Anatomy of Monstrosity. From Grendel to
Blade and Women, Violence and Poethics of Revenge in Renaissance England.
Bożena Kucała teaches nineteenth-century and contemporary English literature at the English
Department of the Jagiellonian University in Cracow. Her doctoral thesis analysed the concept
of history and its representations in selected twentieth-century English fiction. Her academic
interests include nineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction, history and the novel, intertextuality.
She has published articles (in English and Polish) on contemporary novelists, especially Gra-
ham Swift, A.S. Byatt, Peter Ackroyd and J.M. Coetzee as well as translated academic essays
into Polish. She has also prepared a revised and updated edition of Bronisława Bałutowa’s book
Powieść angielska XX wieku (The English Twentieth-Century Novel) and is currently working
on her own book on intertextuality in neo-Victorian fiction.
Robert Kusek is an Assistant Lecturer at the Institute of English Philology of the Jagiellon-
ian University, Cracow, as well as journalist and translator. He graduated from the Institute
of English Philology and the Institute of Journalism and Social Communication of the Jagiel-
lonian University, Krakow. In 2011 he completed his PhD thesis entitled Authors on Authors
in Selected Biographical Fiction by David Lodge, Colm Tóibín, Michael Cunningham and
J.M. Coetzee. His research interests include poetics of memory (biography, autobiography,
memoir) and loss, the Holocaust and its representation in culture, postcolonialism and media.
He is also active in intercultural dialogue and holds the position of the Polish Coordinator of the
Anna Lindh Euro-Mediterranean Foundation for the Dialogue Between Cultures.
Anna Ledwina is a graduate of Romance Philology a the University of Wrocław. In 2003
she successfully defended her doctoral thesis on innovative trends in the works of Sidonie-
Gabrielle Colette. Currently, she holds the position of an Assistant Professor at the Department
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